


More and More

by boulanger



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F, Gen, Rowing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-16
Updated: 2020-06-16
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:20:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24751492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boulanger/pseuds/boulanger
Summary: “Right, it’s no big deal. Just the biggest head race in the Principality, only five turns and six bridges. Piece of cake.”
Relationships: Gucci Garantine/Clementine Kesh
Comments: 5
Kudos: 17





	More and More

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for a brief reference to disordered eating. Unfortunately a very real part of crew culture (and also having a shitty mom culture).

The first race of the season is in Cruciat, which means it’s still cold enough that the shallows of Lake Verglaz are, indeed, iced over despite the fact that it was ostensibly spring. Their dock, too, had still been icy by their 7:45 launch time. Watching her rowers shuffle down the ramp with the brand new Pocock had nearly given Clementine an aneurysm. Breaking the team's nicest boat would surely make people remember her name, but it wasn't exactly the legacy she was looking for.

Things were running rather smoothly, in fact, which only put Clem more on edge as they sat at the starting line. Race day never went smoothly. There was always some sort of crisis.

Clementine can handle crisis, though, and even if she couldn’t, she was going to anyway. If you asked her coach, that was her sole job as a coxswain: to be the quick-thinker, the tactician, to deal with whatever challenge was thrown her way.

If you asked her rowers, it was Clem’s job to be dead weight.

When a stiff breeze picks up from the shore, Clem feels it through her windbreaker as she squints off at the distance. It was subtle, but the boat’s bow had drifted to port and instead of a straight-shot, her course now pointed into lane two. Not a crisis, but just her luck.

Clem glances around at the other lanes. The Nideo crew had just locked onto their stakeboat and were still finding a point. It was a bit dangerous, and Clem was never one to run the possibility of being caught off-guard at the start when she had a perfectly functioning rudder under her control, but she was likely to have enough time.

“Three, scull two. Light,” Clem says, terse. She leans forward, refocusing on her point as it straightens back out in minute adjustments. Satisfied, she relaxes back. “Easy.”

Clem watches their orange blades rest flat on the surface of the water before glancing back out at the other lanes. Nideo, in their hulking WinTech (with _metal riggers_ of all things, had they no shame?), had at last stopped fussing with their point. Save for some indistinct chatter, the course falls silent. Clementine can feel her heart rate pick up as she fusses with her headset one last time. 

“Sit ready.”

This is Clem’s favorite part. Eight oars skip back across the water, eight seats rumble up their respective tracks. Their blades stay flat, bodies not yet tensed for the first stroke, but it’s all anticipation. Eight girls completely focused on her.

After all, there were only so many of her commands that they followed. At least they listened to this one.

And then the magic breaks.

“Let’s go, Kesh!” hollers stroke seat. Someone in bow wolf-whistles. Clem’s expression sours and she covers her mic with her hand, glaring at the girl in front of her. 

“Gucci--!” she hisses.

With an expression full of exaggerated innocence, Gucci Garantine opens her mouth as if to retort, but is mercifully cut off by the disembodied voice of the race official. Instead, she rolls her shoulders back, sits tall, and lets her gaze fall past Clem’s shoulder.

“Apostolos. Columnar. _Kesh._ ” Her heart skips a beat, but otherwise Clementine tries to ignore the official’s tone as they continue to list off each team, lane-by-lane. “Attention-”

Eyes narrow, muscles tense. With a single _thunk_ , every oar rotates and locks into the water, ready for the first stroke. Clem holds herself still.

“Row.”

* * *

They come in third, which is fine, Clem can deal, but Gucci _has_ to open her mouth and say something about how bronze suits her skin tone more than silver or gold and that’s enough to send her over the edge.

“It _would_ have been fifth, Gucci,” she snaps, “if we’d gotten a penalty for your stunt at the start.”

And, of course, because that was how this day was going, the word “penalty” catches the coach's attention, who _somehow_ blames the whole ordeal on _her._

“I put you in the eight because I believe you can be a great coxswain, Clementine,” they say, at some point in the five-minute lecture they deliver in plain view of everyone at the regatta, “but you need to be a great leader if you want to be that great coxswain.”

“I _am_ a great leader! They just don’t listen!” is all Clem can think to say before storming off to sulk in the stands and watch the Kesh lightweight quad win their heat by three boat-lengths.

* * *

The driver is an hour late to pick her up, and when her mother clicks her tongue at the bronze medal, Clem can’t decide if she wants to cry or hit someone or both.

* * *

The medal is still sitting on a table in the foyer a week later. Clementine has developed a real aptitude for pretending it's not there. No doubt it's her mother's way of salting the wound. Eventually, Clem assumes, she will have it thrown out, but not any time soon. The Kesh family deals foremost in slow burns.

Whatever becomes of the medal, though, it certainly won't be hung with the others. No, that display is the focal point of the sitting room. Even if it had been a gold, a single medal from a qualifier regatta hardly deserves a place beside the array of championship trophies Crysanth Kesh had earned during her tenure as the coxswain of the varsity eight.

Kesh had won championships last year, but even that trophy wasn't allowed with the others. Clementine had been in the _second_ varsity eight. Though she had won her event with open water, it didn't count towards their title.

"Maybe next year, dear," her mother had said, before smiling like she had told a joke.

And that was the thing about following in her mother's footsteps as a coxswain. Clementine had joined the juniors’ team at thirteen with delusions of forming a genuine bond with her. In a way it _had_ brought them closer; instead of sitting in uncomfortable silence during meals and car rides, Clementine could ramble on about how practice had gone and Crysanth would at least pretend to pay attention. 

Her mother had been a natural cox. Where Clem struggled with her calls, Crysanth was poised and perfect. Where Clem could hardly hold her boat to a stroke rate, Crysanth had commanded the respect of her rowers. Crysath never had any trouble steering. Crysanth never messed up a drill sequence.

At Clem’s age, Crysanth had been smaller and skinnier, too. Crysanth often reminds her of this, explicitly sometimes, and sometimes by simply eyeing her portion sizes with mild judgement and forbidding the kitchen staff from giving her snacks.

The last time someone had asked her what she liked about rowing, at some insipid dinner party her mother had hosted, Clem hadn’t been able to respond.

* * *

They get new unis just before Oxbridge Sprints, the last qualifying race before championships. They're a tasteful cream-and-tangerine with the Kesh sphinx embroidered over the left breast in a rich amber.

Gucci laughs at her when she describes them as such.

"Tangerine, Clementine. That ought to be a punchline to something." Gucci turns to her teammates. "Can't wait to get a shitty suntan in these."

* * *

Oxbridge Sprints is everything Cruciat hadn’t been: loud, hot, and bustling with energy. It bannered itself as the ‘largest regatta in the Principality’ and Clem is convinced this is not an exaggeration in the slightest. 

The eight doesn’t race until tomorrow and normally Clementine would spend the day in a lounge chair at the hotel pool, but this time she puts on her favorite sundress and tags along with the scullers.

The scullers like her, sort of. The scullers are really, really afraid of her surname, but in Clem’s experience, that was usually the same thing as liking her. Today, though, they hardly pay any attention to her, caught up in their race-day ministrations.

It’s barely 7:30, but the race course thrums with excitement. Boats line the shore as far as the eye can see, banners in the colors of every stel dance in the breeze. The river itself is, ironically, completely still in contrast. In half an hour, the first race of the day will come down the course and disturb the peace. But for now, the water is perfect, flat glass reflecting a cloudless sky.

Clementine watches the girls from the lightweight quad braid each other’s hair and bicker affectionately over where to eat dinner. Something in the pit of her stomach twists at the sight and she decides it’s disgust, or maybe just her breakfast.

* * *

Here’s how Oxbridge goes:

They’re fast off the start, bowball-to-bowball with Apostolos. Clem holds them up at a sprint for ten more strokes than the normal race plan; they push ahead by a seat.

But the shift into their base stroke rate is sloppy and immediately undoes their lead. Clem tries to keep her rowers aggressive, but their strokes are becoming increasingly lazy. 

“Keep your blades off the water,” she barks, still keeping one eye on the lane beside her. They’re solidly in third, now, half a length back on Apostolos and two-- three-- _four_ seats down on Orion as they hit the 1500-meter mark. Already a quarter of the race behind them.

All they need to advance to finals is to come in fourth. From there, the top two compete for the title, and Kesh has _never_ not been in the top two. Ever. 

But today they only have to beat one crew.

Clem keeps them neck-and-neck with Orion into the halfway point. Apostolos has pulled well ahead by now, with open water on everyone else. When she calls the halfway move, she gives them ten strokes to walk in front of Orion. It’s clear by the fifth stroke that it’s not going to happen. In fact, it’s Orion who’s walking away.

“Come _on._ Only a thousand meters to go. More power!”

At 750, things get worse. They’re sitting bow-to-stern on Orion, nearly a full boat length behind. Columnar had appeared out of nowhere and suddenly they were scrapping it out for third. Bladework has just gone to shit, they’re dropping down to starboard side at the catch, and bow four are falling out of time. Clem snaps at them, and perhaps she’s a bit vitriolic, but if they want anything better than fourth place, her rowers will have to clean their act up.

Clementine abandons the race plan entirely in the last 500. 

“Kesh, we need to make a move. We’re taking our sprint early,” she says, and calls the stroke rate up.

Gucci meets her eyes and, still pulling with full intensity, manages to shake her head.

Clem fumes. “Yes, you _will_.”

But Gucci refuses to budge, and so do all seven of the other rowers behind her. Clementine glances out at the shoreline and her eyes immediately catch the bright orange flag flying from her team’s tent. The head coach is standing out front, their arms crossed. Desperation turns in Clem’s stomach.

Columnar has, by now, gained far too many seats on them for third to be within reasonable reach. But Nideo, three lanes over, is still trailing in fifth. Fourth was fine. Fourth would still get them to finals. 

“Last 250. Just hold it here, we’ll still advance.” 

With how heavy the strokes are, it feels like they’re moving through molasses. Clem knows she should be paying attention to the other lanes, or at least what was going on in her own boat, but she keeps her eyes locked on the finish line as it inches closer and counts down the last few dozen meters.

When they cross the line, two buzzers sound off in quick succession. Clementine frantically looks across at the other lanes-- their finish had been a close call, but with whom? Not Apostolos or Orion, and the Columnar crew was passing around a water bottle, so it couldn’t have been them. Her eyes fall on Nideo. When had they closed that gap?

Their coach isn’t waiting for them on the dock, and that’s when they know. For the first time in history, Stel Kesh had come in fifth. Their season was over.

* * *

They blame it all on her.

“Okay. Clementine failed to execute the sprint,” says the coach, jotting it on the whiteboard. “That’s when Nideo was able to walk up on us.”

Gucci, still in her uni, cheeks tear-stained, speaks up. “Clem didn’t execute _anything._ Nothing she called was part of the race plan.”

The other seven nod.

“Yeah, she called the start sequence weird.”

“She tried to get us to sprint too early.”

“Way too many technical calls. We didn’t know where we were.”

And so forth.

Clementine sulks in the corner and stares at her phone lockscreen. Why couldn’t they see that _she_ was the coxswain for a reason? If they had just trusted her judgement, they would have surely won.

“Anything to add, Clementine?” Her coach is poised, whiteboard marker in hand.

“No,” says Clem, and she stands up, gathering her bag under her arm. “I quit.”

* * *

She had expected it to be a bigger deal.

Clem tells her mother over the phone that night and is surprised (disappointed?) when Crysanth barely seems to care. 

“I see,” is all she says. No anger, no disappointment. Nothing.

Months pass. Her coaches never email her, she never gets a text from a teammate. Kesh goes completely undefeated the following season, with a brand new star coxswain. Clementine tries to ignore the headlines. She moves to an estate up north and doesn’t do much of anything for the majority of five years.

Except, of course, one night, she has maybe a little too much wine and decides, perhaps ill-advisedly, to take herself on a midnight drive. Even years later, the last thing she will ever remember of that evening is putting the keys in the ignition.

* * *

Clementine is staring at her hands. She has been staring at them for quite a while, she reckons, and very much would like to be looking at anything else. She’s lying on her side, so her hands rest lightly on her pillow. When she focuses, she can see that her nails have grown longer than she prefers and that her skin looks terribly pale. But focusing is hard, so Clem just stares and tries not to see much at all.

An hour, or maybe five minutes, later, her doctor comes by to check in. He doesn’t bother to make any conversation, just putters around the room and pokes at the various machines hooked up to her. When Clem turns to watch him, he jumps.

“Miss Kesh,” he stammers. “How are you feeling?”

Clem blinks. Tilts her head just a fraction. “Bad.” Words are still very, very hard, and talking is even harder. She forces the next sentence out slowly, one syllable at a time. “What’s going on?”

The Winter Doctor laughs. “Still having trouble remembering?”

Clementine doesn’t find that funny at all, but accepts the notepad that he passes her from the nightstand. The writing on the page is unmistakably her own neat cursive, albeit shaky. She focuses on the words despite her growing migraine.

_Car accident._

_Surgery went bad. Got sick._

_C. K._

Clem reads her letter about fifteen times over, tracing each character with her index finger. When she looks up, the doctor is gone. It’s just her, again, and the silence, and her hands.

* * *

She heals, slowly.

No, healing isn’t the right word. It feels, really, like Clementine is becoming a different person entirely. Frankly she _looks_ like a different person. They had cut her hair at some point during the months she had been bedridden. It sits just at her jawline now. Clem likes it.

She starts to sneak out to go on runs, to clear her head and to feel like a person with a body again, and learns she can barely finish a lap before she has to stop and puke. Her doctors disapprove of her outings immensely and try to point to this as evidence as to why she should take things slow and follow their recovery timeline. This, of course, does nothing to deter Clem. She pushes herself harder, faster, further.

When she passes out on the track and doesn’t wake up until ten hours later, she concedes.

“What you need right now is something low-impact,” explains the Winter Doctor. “Perhaps rowing?”

Clementine laughs so hard she cries.

* * *

She’s allowed on the rowing machine, with a few provisions. The resistance has to stay at zero. She can’t go above sixteen strokes-per-minute. She can’t look at her split time on the monitor. Someone has to be in the room with her.

The list goes on.

What’s mortifying, though, is that even with all the restrictions, the workouts are still a massive challenge. Rowing is _hard_ , Clementine is quick to realize, and it makes every single muscle in her body sore. Even at long, low stroke rates, holding on to her technique is a challenge. But her doctor assures her that she is slowly but surely making progress and Clem clings to that.

When they (finally, _finally_ ) let her out on the water, though, it’s a different story.

“Keep your wrists flat,” barks Sovereign Immunity over the noise of the outboard motor on his shitty, ancient launch. Clementine has absolutely no idea where anyone had found the most renowned crew coach in the entire Principality or how they were able to convince him to come out of retirement for the sake of a sickly ex-coxswain, but knows better than to ask questions.

What she doesn’t know better than to do, however, is hold her tongue.

“I’m _trying_.”

“Not hard enough. Run the drill again.”

* * *

“What do you want,” asks Sovereign Immunity one night over drinks, “from me?”

Clem’s lip quirks. “Excuse me?”

SI is relaxed back into his chair, twirling the stem of his wineglass between his thumb and forefinger. “You’re competent on the water. You’re-- well, you’re not _better_ , but you’re on the mend. Why am I still here?”

“If you’re not happy, you’re free to go,” Clementine says, morosely.

SI laughs from his belly. “I’ll remember that. But _you’re_ keeping me around, Clementine. Do you want something more?”

Does she?

Five years ago, she hadn’t. She had wanted her coaches to be impressed and her mother to be proud, but there was no ambition. 

She had spent the last five years lounging around the Winter Palace, accomplishing nothing. What kind of Kesh was she becoming? Was this going to be her legacy, a nameless noble, faded into the background of history? She had always known she was meant for greatness. If she was going to fulfill that destiny, it would have to be this.

The Kesh team would never take her back as a coxswain, not that Clem particularly wanted to cox again. Perhaps there was another way, though. Perhaps, if she was good enough, fast enough, won enough races, Kesh would have no choice but to beg her to rejoin their team.

There’s no hesitation. “Yes.”

Sovereign Immunity smiles.

* * *

In the weeks following that conversation, the plan starts to take shape. A proper training schedule, with morning practice starting at five, weight training on alternating days, and extra sessions on the rowing machine in the afternoon. 

It’s nostalgic in a strange and roundabout way. Crew had always, at least theoretically, been a team sport to Clem, but going solo feels right. There’s no miscommunication or distrust or backstabbing when it’s just her. 

They start in late winter and practice through spring and summer. Long steady-state, technique-focused workouts slowly become short, intense pieces. She sets new personal best times practically every week. 

Clementine and SI are both a little tipsy when they enter her in the Prophet’s Path at the end of summer and it doesn’t feel real until he’s helping her carry her oars down to the dock on race day.

“Stay focused. Use that coxswain brain and steer a good course,” Sovereign Immunity says. 

Clem has her single, a sleek Filippi called the _Panther_ that has been in the family as long as anyone can remember, over her shoulder, so her words come out a little thin, but her tone is clear. “Right, it’s no big deal. Just the biggest head race in the Principality, only five turns and six bridges. Piece of cake.”

“Oh, don’t be like that, Clementine. Pull hard. What’ve you got to lose?”

Clementine stays quiet after that, launches her boat and makes her way to the starting line, running through her warm-up on autopilot. The Prophet’s Path, like any head race, runs on a rolling start and when the official gives her the OK to build into full intensity, Clem expects to feel that out-of-body, foggy, adrenaline-fueled confusion that she had come to associate with racing years ago. Instead, today, she’s completely lucid. 

Her strokes fall into rhythm: catch-drive-release-recover, holding her tempo for the whole five kilometers. They’ve run her race plan so many times that it happens without her even having to think about it. She hugs the inside of the buoy line around each turn, keeping careful control of her pressure on each oar so as to steer the most direct course. She passes a few others in her event, she thinks, but doesn’t bother to keep track.

In the last few hundred meters, she kicks into the sprint. Her muscles burn and her body desperately wants to collapse into itself and let her bladework go sloppy, but she can feel the eyes of everyone in the stands, along the shore, and peering over the final bridge, and so forces herself to be tall and precise, and pours everything else into her legs, pushing with all her energy.

The sound of the buzzer as she rows through the finish line might very well be the best sound she’s ever heard. Clem takes one last, big stroke, glides it out, and slaps her blades back down on the water. Her heart is still jackrabbiting and her mouth is parched, but the official at the finish line is eyeing her, so she picks her handles back up and paddles her way back to the dock.

She’s hardly out of her boat before SI pulls her into a big hug.

“You won,” he says, but the words don’t really register. Everything feels fuzzy and distant, and her heart rate still hasn’t slowed down. SI is still talking, but Clementine can’t make out any words.

“Pardon?” she asks, and then promptly faints.

* * *

Her mother throws a party.

Clem wants badly to resent her for it, for showing up after years of essentially no contact, for claiming Clem’s hard-earned victory for herself and the Kesh name. In fact, Crysanth had sent out invitations before Clementine had even been discharged from the hospital.

(It hadn’t been anything more than a little bit of dehydration and overexertion, but even so it had set everyone on edge. She earned herself a lecture from Sovereign Immunity and a strongly-worded email from the Winter Doctor as penance.)

Clem wants badly to resent her for it, but even if she’s just being paraded around as a prop by her mother at least _some_ of the attention is on her. Everyone wants to shake hands with her, the dark-horse, ex-coxswain, Kesh-heiress winner of the Prophet’s Path who pulled so hard she blacked out. There’s voicemails in her inbox from a dozen sports editors begging for a quote. 

“Clementine Kesh?”

It’s at least the thirtieth time someone has tried to get her attention tonight, and she’s had quite a bit of champagne, so Clementine turns towards them. At first Clem doesn’t recognize her. It’s been years, and, again, there is a significant amount of alcohol in her system. She’s dressed in red, with a bold chevron on her face to match. 

“It really is you…” she says, and it all clicks.

“Guh--” Clem stumbles back. “Gucci.”

Gucci frowns and cocks her head towards the door. “Not in here.”

Clementine follows her outside. It’s a crisp autumn night, chilly enough to sober her up a little but not so cold as to be uncomfortable. They wander past the veranda and into the garden. Eventually, Gucci stops and leans up against the base of some statue. Clem stands awkwardly in the middle of the path. They’re absolutely out of earshot from anyone at the party, but they stand in silence for a long moment. Clementine’s eyes flicker over Gucci, trying to get a real look at her, but their eyes meet uncomfortably and she realizes Gucci had been doing the same thing.

Clem knows she looks different. Unrecognizable, even. She’s no longer the scrawny teenage coxswain Gucci had known, and was starting to properly grow into herself. Though she’s rather short for a rower, she has all the other features: sturdy thighs, broad shoulders, and even the beginnings of defined abs. She’d kept her hair short and wears it down more often now, instead of long and tied up in a braid like it had always been before. And, she knows, in this dress, part of a scar is visible along her shoulder blade.

Gucci hasn’t aged a day.

“It’s good to see you,” says Clementine, breaking the silence.

“Likewise. And, I suppose, congratulations.”

“If you don’t mind me asking--” Clem pauses to swallow heavily. “Why are you here?”

Gucci reaches into her breast pocket and when she pulls it out, there’s a medal in the palm of her hand. It’s hard to make out in the half-light, but Clem swears it’s a bronze. Gucci carefully puts it back.

“Your mother invited everyone you just beat. Quite the woman, isn’t she?”

“Mm.”

“Oh, don’t look so sheepish, Clementine. I raced in that event just for fun. We won in the eight.”

“Won in the eight?” Clem’s eyes go wide. She had seen those results. “You’re rowing for Horizon.”

So that was why they were sneaking about. Horizon was one of the best composite teams in the Principality. They pulled together top rowers from dozens of clubs, raced without so much as a single practice, and won wherever they went on sheer talent. It was all perfectly allowed under the rules, but most teams looked down on the whole concept. If the Kesh national team caught word of it, she was done for. Even if she was the ace of the team, their prized stroke seat.

“Sometimes. Just to live a little, you know?”

“You are… full of surprises.”

Gucci rests her hand lightly on top of her breast pocket. “As are you.”

“I suppose.” 

“I’m serious, Clementine. How _did_ you do it?”

“I just pulled hard.”

Gucci laughs at that. “I ran into your coach earlier. He’s very proud of you, you know.”

Clementine takes in a small breath.

“He kept going on about how you steered the best course he’d ever seen at that race,” Gucci continues. She gives a sly smile. “And to think I always believed you were such a terrible coxswain.”

With that, Gucci turns away from Clem and back towards the party. “It was lovely to catch up with you.”

Gucci’s footsteps on the cobblestones grow quiet, and Clem doesn’t follow after her.

* * *

Then, Clementine accidentally sets a world record.

After she wins at the Prophet’s Path, her mother takes a more vested (albeit just as distant) interest in Clem’s rowing career. Clem gets the best of everything: athletic trainers, strength coaches, a nutritionist, and even someone to handle PR. They run all manner of tests on her, from body composition to aerobic capacity. The pre- and post-workout concoctions they give her to drink are so effective that she worries it might be doping. Physically, her fitness positively skyrockets.

Icebreaker is just to test her mettle. Indoor rowing competitions don’t really count towards anything, but if she has the mental fortitude (or stubbornness) to win here, as SI reminds her frequently, she can absolutely crush her competition on the water.

Clementine knows she’s won her event when she finishes the piece, but she doesn’t learn the other half until she’s cornered in the empty locker room by, of all people, Gucci Garantine. Here to “cheer on a friend”, of course.

“What was your time?” she asks, without preamble. 

Clem’s hair is still damp with sweat, and her arms are only halfway through the sleeves of her sweatshirt, but she’s too exhausted to get frazzled. She gives her the number. Gucci crosses the room so that she’s close enough that Clem can read the Google search for “fastest 2k rowing” on her phone screen. The time next to Clem’s event category is nearly identical except for one difference: Clem’s time was faster by four-tenths of a second.

“Oh my god,” says Clem.

Gucci pockets her phone and steps closer. Clem is still frozen, staring at the place her phone had been.

“Clementine Kesh. Winner of the Prophet’s Path.”

“Oh my _god_.”

Gucci takes Clementine’s chin with her thumb and index finger and gently tilts it upwards. Her fingers are calloused, but warm. Clem’s eyes snap to hers.

“World record-holder.”

“I don’t--”

Gucci shakes her head. “Stop acting so humble. I know you love this.”

It’s the exercise endorphins, or she’s just crashing from stress, or maybe she’s under the influence of some arcane magic. Either way, Clem cannot properly rationalize what she does next: she leans up and presses her lips to Gucci’s.

It’s not a very exciting kiss. Gucci’s fingers briefly move from Clem’s chin to her jawline, and she kisses back a little. Clementine, for her part, stays very still.

“Well,” says Gucci, after they break away.

Clem can’t meet her gaze. She tugs her arms the rest of the way through her sweatshirt. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

“Okay.”

“And don’t think you can take my spot in the eight so easily. I’ll be keeping an eye on you.”

The door of the locker room swings open, and a few of the other rowers from the last heat file in. 

Clem carefully closes the zipper of her game bag. Her hands are shaking. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

* * *

Sprint season rolls around. Clem is on edge, itching to race again. Sovereign Immunity has spent the last three months researching and reaching out to his old rowing connections, drafting up her schedule. There’s an art to this, claims SI. Clementine needs to be racing the right competitors, at the right race, at the right time of the season. The process is made all the more tricky but the fact that she has to enter independently, rather than under a club. All in all, Clem is starting to wonder if she should have real concerns for SI’s health.

“This is serious,” he says, combing through his thin hair with his fingers. “You’ll be facing real competition now.”

Clem has her feet up on his desk. “Was I not already?”

Sovereign Immunity locks eyes with her. “No.”

And so it’s no surprise when she pulls up to the starting line and sees Gucci two lanes over.

SI had been right, spring racing season was so much more competitive than she had imagined it to be. She hadn’t even placed in her last race, and the one before that, she had come in sixth. It was quite demoralizing; Clementine had gotten used to winning.

Gucci gives her a little salute and Clem nods back. 

They had exchanged a few texts since Icebreaker, but nothing salacious or even remotely scandalous. Put frankly, Clem had been set on edge by Gucci’s assertion that she wanted her spot in the Kesh eight. Nobody knew that, not even SI. Was she that easy to read?

The race goes off without a hitch: it’s top two to finals, and Clem makes the cut.

(Gucci doesn’t.)

* * *

Clementine gets a text from Gucci later that evening. It’s a single line: a room number, the phrase “recovery cardio?”, and a winky-face emoticon. She nearly throws her phone across the room.

* * *

"Want to take a shower?" Gucci asks, after. She stands up, grabbing her discarded t-shirt from where it had gotten tangled in the bedsheets, and Clem suddenly realizes exactly what she's asking.

"Ah… isn't that awfully intimate?"

Gucci looks at her like she's grown a second head. "Did I not just eat you out?"

"Right. Yes."

"Clementine, you don't have to. It's alright." Gucci says, quickly, and steps into the bathroom before Clem can respond.

It feels like she’s done something irrevocable. In situations like these, it was best to cut her losses. Clementine dresses quickly. She steals a hair tie from Gucci’s coat pocket and only feels a little bit bad about it. (Surely sex hair was a greater social sin than borrowing something from an old friend?)

What she doesn’t expect is to wake up to a text from Gucci. 

_Good luck tomorrow. Want my hairband back tho_

Clem leaves her on read.

* * *

She wins.

“Is something the matter, Clementine?” asks SI. 

“Nothing. Just sore.”

“...Okay.”

* * *

Gucci smells like dried sweat and sunscreen. They’re lying together, close, but not touching. Not facing each other.

It keeps happening, is the thing, and every time it does it feels like Clem sinks in deeper.

“Why come back?” Gucci asks, suddenly.

“To rowing?” Clementine doesn’t wait for an answer. “I’m not sure. I didn’t expect it to go so far.”

“Mmm.”

“It’s kind of hard to quit.”

“Oh, I know.”

* * *

It all comes to a head the week of Clem’s biggest race.

“Okay,” SI says, waving his phone around. “You have _no_ idea how many favors I just called in. Win this weekend, and you’re having dinner with the Kesh coaching staff.”

Clem wants that dinner, badly. But two months of constant travelling and back-to-back races were doing a number on her health. She was stiff everywhere and her stamina was absolutely abysmal; there was only so much her doctors and trainers could do on the road. And of course, of all regattas, that weekend is Oxbridge Sprints.

She’s a ball of nerves all of Friday, snapping at everyone who even looks at her funny and refusing any help with pulling her boat off the trailer and getting it re-rigged. Even Sovereign Immunity keeps his distance. They set up a fair distance from the Kesh tent (and, by proxy, Gucci), but it’s very big and very orange and impossible to ignore entirely. 

Clementine barely touches her dinner and gets absolutely no sleep that night. SI looks like he has something to say on Saturday morning, but holds his tongue.

At the starting line, Clem shuts her eyes and just lets herself feel the boat roll with the river’s gentle waves. She doesn’t think about the promise of dinner. She doesn’t think about Kesh. And she certainly doesn’t think about Gucci Garantine sitting at the front of the eight.

“Attention--”

When the official’s voice comes through the speaker, her eyes open and she squares her two blades in the water. She can feel her heartbeat in the palms of her hands as they grip the oars. Above her, the sky is perfectly clear, just like it had been six years ago.

“Row.”

**Author's Note:**

> God I hope this thing is intelligible. I really tried to pare down the rowing jargon but at the end of the day I think this fic exists for me and me only.
> 
> Because I'm not even remotely creative, the three named races are all based off real-life regattas: Oxbridge Sprints is Dad Vails, Prophet's Path is Head of the Charles, and Icebreaker is C.R.A.S.H.-B Sprints. I have never actually competed at any of these (though I have raced on the Schuylkill before).
> 
> Title very blatantly takes its name from the most recent TWICE release. It's not a song that reminds me of Clem or anything its just a banger <3


End file.
